Drivers included in the Linux kernel

vmw_balloon (VMware Balloon Driver): This is VMware physical memory management driver which acts like a "balloon" that can be inflated to reclaim physical pages by reserving them in the guest and invalidating them in the monitor, freeing up the underlying machine pages so they can be allocated to other guests. The balloon can also be deflated to allow the guest to use more physical memory. If this driver is loaded memory which is deallocated in the virtual machine can be reused in the host machine. Without this driver the memory would be allocated to the guest until the guest is terminated.

vmwgfx (DRM driver for VMware Virtual GPU): Choose this option if you would like to run 3D acceleration in a VMware virtual machine. This is a KMS enabled DRM driver for the VMware SVGA2 virtual hardware.

VMware tools versus Open-VM-Tools

VMware Tools for linux exists in 2 forms: the official VMware Tools and Open-VM-Tools. VMware Tools is based on a stable snapshot of Open-VM-Tools. Open-VM-Tools contains more experimental code and features.
The official VMware Tools are not available for Archlinux.

Originally, VMware Tools provided the best drivers for network and storage, combined with the functionality for other features such as time synchronization. However, for quite a while now the drivers for the network adapter en scsi adapter are part of the linux kernel, and VMware Tools is only needed for extra features and support for the "old" vmxnet adapter.

Open-VM-Tools modules

The open-vm-tools-dkms package contains the following modules:

vmblock: kernel filesystem module, enables drag&drop functionality between the host system and the virtual machine in VMware Workstation/Fusion.

vmhgfs: kernel filesystem module, enables file/directory sharing between the host system and the virtual machine in VMware Workstation/Fusion.

Clone to a directory, copy the official VMwareTools tarball and execute untar-and-patch-and-compile.sh as root.

There is also a pending issue here, where one line has to be patched before vmhgfs compiles.

Time synchronization

Configuring time synchronization in a virtual machine is important: fluctuations are bound to occur more easily in a virtual machine compared to a physical host. This is mostly due to the fact that the CPU is shared by more than one virtual machine.

There are 2 options to set up time synchronization: the host machine as source or an external server as source.

Host machine as time source

To use the host as a time source (for example in an ESX server), run the following command (one time is enough):

vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync enable

To synchronize your guest clock with the host after your host machine wakes up from sleeping (like a laptop computer):

sudo hwclock --hctosys --localtime

I run the above command every time I wake up my sleeping laptop and resume using Arch Linux inside the VMWare Player.

VMCI

The VMCI interface is enabled by default in VMware Workstation and Fusion. In VMware ESX the interface is restricted, which means that communication is only possible between ESX and the virtual machine, not between virtual machines themselves. This can be changed in the Virtual Machine settings, traffic between ESX and the Virtual Machine can not be disabled.

Drag and drop

Drag and Drop from files, from VMware Workstation/Fusion into the Virtual Machines, can be disabled by editing /etc/conf.d/open-vm-tools:

VM_DRAG_AND_DROP="no"

Copy and paste

Install gtkmm since it is required for copy/paste but not listed as a dependency as reported here.

Run the following command after starting X (or add it to your ~/.xinitrc file) to automatically synchronize your X clipboard with the host's. This allows you to copy text from your virtual machine and paste it in the host, and vice versa.

vmware-user-suid-wrapper

If you get the following error (which, in rare cases, you might have to run strace vmware-user-suid-wrapper to see it!)

Shared folders with the host

Note: This functionality is only available in VMware Workstation and Fusion

Create a new Shared Folder by selecting VM > Settings... in the VMware Workstation menu. Select the Options tab and then ic|Shared Folder. Enable the Always enabled option and create a new share. For Windows XP, you can create a share named C with the host path C:\.

Add the following rule to /etc/fstab (adjust the uid/gid where needed) for each shared folder:

Prune mlocate DB

When using mlocate, it's useless to index the shared directories in the locate DB. Therefore, add the directories to PRUNEPATHS in /etc/updatedb.

Trouble shooting

Mouse not working as expected

There is an issue with mouse input when running X11 in a VMware host. If you experience one or more of the following:

the automatic grab/ungrab feature of VMware will not automatically grab input when the cursor enters the window

mouse input lag

mouse clicks are not registered in some programs

You may need to disable the catch-all evdev driver in X11: edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf and comment out the section with the identifier evdev pointer catchall [xf86-input-vmmouse does not work expected].